Marriage Matters

We rang in the New Year at home, in the company of our middle two children, who relished the chance to stay up late with parental approbation.

We’ve proclaimed before our strong introversion and preference for quiet times with only a handful of dear ones about. So to call this event’s observance a “celebration” might be stretching it a bit: we typically open a couple bags of chips and a bottle of sparkling grape juice, then talk or play something like Scrabble until it’s time to turn on the television… and 10 minutes later we go to bed.

It seems that every year, we comment to each other on the overwhelming numbers of people who jam together on the street in New York City, in the freezing cold, to watch the same thing we get to see in our warm — and wonderfully uncrowded — house.

Prior to the stroke of midnight, we had harbored a superstitious concern that the calendar would not actually advance this year, at least in the Burg household, because we were minus one “regular.” In the 15 years we have been married, Jim’s best friend from college has joined us for every New Year’s celebration except the year he was teaching in Scotland.

This year, our friend was once again AWOL. Or rather, he was celebrating in Pasadena in advance of his beloved Spartans taking the field in the Rose Bowl game.

Both his absence and the sight of a million revelers in Times Square provoked the same question: what is it about holidays, family celebrations, or about the human animal, that drives people to gather together?

An answer can be found in the research of neuroscientist Matthew D. Lieberman, professor of behavioral sciences and director of UCLA’s Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab.

His recent book, “Social: Why our Brains are Wired to Connect,” describes his brain research, offering insight into the question of our need for social connection.

Lieberman has spent two decades using functional MRI scans to study how the human brain responds to its social context. What he found is that when the brain is not focused on a specific activity, it defaults to thinking about other people and our relationship to them.

He notes, “In other words, the brain's free time is devoted to thinking socially... This neural habit is at work in two-day-old infants and in our adult brains the moment we stop whatever else we are doing. In essence, our brains are built to practice thinking about the social world and our place in it.”

So even in the mass of strangers crammed into Times Square, the stories told by the news cameras are of the more meaningful relationships of couples and friends… just like us at home in our pajamas, wanting to be together to celebrate, not just the New Year, but also our relationship and our connection.

Page 2 of 2 - James Burg, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Indiana University-Purdue, Fort Wayne. His wife, Audora, is a freelance writer. You may contact them at marriage@charter.net.